🤔 You just got pwned...by the law edition

Happy Wednesday!

“Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.” ― Euripides, The Bacchae

When I hear stories of startup scams, I often wonder if a technical person tried to talk the founders or VCs out of it. Like how did that conversation go??

In today’s newsletter:

• They're coming for your bank account — Federal Agents take down scammers

Penses

We dedicate today’s newsletter to all the people who fell for multilevel marketing scams. Scams sometimes just get us.

Today we’re going to talk about several scams that got more funding than my legitimate ideas because I'm feel crunchy as I prepare to drive Lyft to pay for my phone bill.

Razor mask made money by lying about masks. The masks sold for $100 each. They were supposed to be N95 mask but guess what? They weren’t. The FTC pwned them just this week with a $100k fine. They also have to refund $1.1M Read more here.

Theses guys didn’t create a product that was a scam. But they did share all of you health information to ad companies. I better they never worked on a HIPAA compliant application. I wonder if the VCs asked???

Glorified office space company WeWork once valued in the billions filed bankruptcy last year. I’m waiting for a full collapse but maybe they’ll make a comeback. Read more here.

One of my favorite scams. Nikola an electric car company was fined $125M from the SEC in 2021. And the founder a non-technical person is spending 4 years in prison. It’s may favorite because this guy claimed his truck worked by filming it rolling down a hill. 😂 Say what you want but that was epic. Read more here.

One honorable non-tech mention is William-Sonoma. Guess what guys. It’s not made in the USA. The FTC is fining them $3.2M. Read more here.

To my FTC peeps, you’re always great for a laugh in a dark place.

Now, this wasn’t a very techy edition, so I’ll leave you with this. I’m curious if blockchain in the supply chain will take off. This would at the very least prevent the William-Sonoma problem. But I’m not sure how it’s currently being adopted.

Note: Sorry I didn’t post this yesterday when I wrote it. I’ll work on scheduling it in advance next time.